Witches (The Witches)
The witches (or the Secret Society of Witches) are the titular villains of Roald Dahl's 1983 children's fantasy book The Witches and its 1990 live-action film adaptation. Story and four English witches in the film|left]] The all-female, monstrous witches secretly live in every country, despite (also secret) efforts by witch hunters to seek them out. Helga Eveshim (Grandmamma), the elderly grandmother of the young child protagonist Luke, has been one of these hunters in her youth after one witch tried to kill her, but now she is long retired. This is where she gained all her knowledge which she now passes on to her grandson. In every country, the witches are largely different, but they all pose as nice women who live normal lives. They also all use their magic for evil deeds, in particular to cruelly murder children, whose "foul, dirty, stinky" smell they can not stand. The witches of England, for instance, are known to take a great great pleasure to stand back and watch the grown-ups killing their own children who have been turned into animals, and their common traits include being bald and using wigs. "A witch only knows the witches in her own country. She is strictly forbidden to communicate with any foreign witches." But withing each country, "they are all friends. They ring each other up. They swap deadly recipes." ''They are all ruled over by the all-powerful Grand High Witch, of whom the current one in the story is a Norwegian noblewoman named Eva Ernst, the most powerful and terrifying of them all, with whom they meet on their Annual Meetings. In the past, she also faced off against Luke's grandmother Helga, who spent many years in pursuit of her with success. In the book and the film, Luke and Helga by chance stumble on a gathering of all (more than 80) witches residing in England, attended by the Grand High Witch herself, whose evil spell turns Luke into a mouse. However, using her own magic potion formula, which she had devised against English children, they (in the film along with another boy named Bruno) manage to turn all the witches present, including their great queen, into brown mice who keep their intelligence in new forms but are then "smashed and bashed and chopped up into little pieces" by the confused staff. ("Waiters were attacking the mice with chairs and wine-bottles and anything else that came to hand. I saw a chef in a tall white hat rushing out from the kitchen brandishing a frying-pan, and another one just behind him was wielding a carving-knife above his head, and everyone was yelling, 'Mice! Mice! Mice! We must get rid of the mice!' Only the children in the room were really enjoying it. They all seemed to know instinctively that something good was going on right there in front of them, and they were clapping and cheering and laughing like mad.") Armed with it and her contact informations, they are now ready to finally rid the entire world of the plague of the witches, once and for all. Starting in America in the film, while in the book they first plan to kill off her retainers in her castle in Norway, whom they plan to also turn into mice and then have cats eat them before they can escape. The grandmother's plan after clearing and taking over the Grand High Witch's Castle and their magical money-printing machine: ''"Then we shall go through the records and get the names and addresses of all the witches in the whole wide world! After that, my darling, the greatest task of all will begin for you and me! We shall pack our bags and go travelling all over the world! In every country we visit, we shall seek out the houses where the witches are living! We shall find each house, one by one, and having found it, you will creep inside and leave your little drops of deadly Mouse-Maker in the bread, or the cornflakes, or the rice-pudding or whatever food you see lying about. It will be a triumph, my darling! A colossal unbeatable triumph. We shall do it entirely by ourselves, just you and me!") Category:1980s Category:1990s Category:Book Villainess Category:Live Action Villainess Category:Witch Category:Child Defeats Villainess Category:Comical Defeat Category:Turned into Object or Animal Category:Humiliated Category:Fate: Deceased Category:Demise: Body Crushed Category:Defeated By Magic Category:Conspirator Category:Would Hurt a Child Category:Evil Laugh Category:Man Kills Villainess Category:Woman Kills Villainess Category:A Taste Of Her Own Medicine Category:Demise: Poison Category:Serial Killer